"We were not a latter-day Heloise and Abelard, Pelleas and Melisande when
we married. For one thing, the Heloises and Abelards, the Pelleases
and Melisandes, do not get married and stay married for forty years. A
love which depends solely on romance, on the combustion of two
attracting chemistries, tends to fizzle out. The famous lovers usually
end up dead. A long term marriage has to move beyond chemistry to
compatibility, to friendship, to companionship. It is certainly not
that passion disappears, but that it is conjoined with other ways of
love.

Of course, the culture tends to glorify the passionate
whirlwind romance, rather than the steady committed marriage. Anyone
fortunate enough to share in the latter, to enjoy true love, realizes
how empty is the former."

Wow. That's all I could say. As a pastor, I would occasionally visit with people who reported Near Death Experiences (NDE) on an operating room table, a hospital bed, during a car accident or heart attack. Without the necessary and pretty impossible to get research, I wasn't sure what to think about these very similar but unusual events in people's lives. All I could say was Wow.

This article, published April, 2012, in the online magazine Salon, is written by psychology professor and research scientist at the University of Montreal, Mario Beauregard. It is excerpted from his book, "The Brain Wars," and talks of recent research into this quite common human event.

I was always talking about life after death, but was quite sure I knew, really knew, nothing about it. I would speak in the language, images and ideas of my Christian faith tradition. Here is new brain research that confirms what many have said about their experiences, and points to a new truth: that the…